look.
I can look.
She coughs, and one of her friends helps her to her feet. She hobbles closer like she’s broken both ankles, the back of her dainty hand pressed against her mouth like she’s feeling nauseous.
Yeah, I’d be sick too, with all that shit in my stomach.
But…there hadn’t been alcohol. Not on her breath, no taste of it in her mouth.
Vodka. Barely leaves a trace, doesn’t it?
My face hardens, and I want to leave so I don’t have to keep staring at her confused, frightened, pale face.
Instead, I step forward and grab her elbow, steering her in front of me as I cut a swathe through the wooded area surrounding the dam.
Someone lets out a low whistle, but they’re shushed an instant later. Then there’s just silence.
“Where are we going?”
I’d been doing fine until she spoke. I’d even managed to forget how ridiculously stupid she’d been swimming at night with a bunch of boozed-up delinquents.
Like you, Jo?
Fuck that. I’m nothing like her. I don’t have fluff for brains.
“You’re hurting me.”
“What the fuck were you thinking?” I yell, turning on her so fast she walks into me.
Squelch.
A breath huffs out of her. She unbalances. I catch her absently and prop her up before she can land on her ass.
“Huh?” I prompt, shaking her for good measure.
Instead of whimpering, or crying, or complaining, her face twists into a scowl.
A fist comes out of nowhere, but the punch she lands on my jaw barely turns my head. It stings a little, but I doubt it will even bruise. I sigh, close my eyes, and rub my face as if the act can somehow wring energy back into my mind.
“Why didn’t you just let me drown?” she snaps, shoving uselessly at me before detouring around me and heading back the way we came.
Back to the dam.
Back to her friends, and her booze, and her irresponsible life.
“Because who the fuck do you think they’d blame?” I yell after her. “Huh?”
She stops, almost merging with the darkness.
“Who always gets blamed for your fuck ups, Candy?”
The moon has come out, but there’s a lot of foliage between us and its silvery light. Candy’s mostly still shadowed as she steps back toward me.
Still in her wet shirt. Me without shoes or a shirt, drenched.
We could probably have snuck back inside our lodges, but not without leaving traces behind. Damp footprints on the carpet, leaves, sodden clothes in the bathroom.
I’d been heading for the laundry room where, if luck was on our side, we’d at least have one set of dried clothes waiting to be ironed by someone unlucky to be stuck with laundry-room chores tomorrow after school.
“That’s what this is about?” she demands, stopping less than a foot away from me. “You’re pissed at me because your plan backfired? Because we’re both here, and not just me?”
I laugh, but I cut the sound short out of lack of interest. “You really are a crazy fucking bitch.”
This time, she slaps me.
The punch I could handle. But the moment her palm connects with my cheek, it’s as if I’m right back there in the kitchen with Dad.
What do you do when you don’t have enough balls to punch someone? You fucking slap them, or you backhand them.
Neither are meant to hurt—just to humiliate.
Candy gasps when I ram her against the closest tree. She squirms, trying to get a knee up, but I kick her legs open and slide between them, so there’s nowhere she can reach that’ll hurt enough for me to let her go.
When this doesn’t stop her fighting back, I grab her wrists and slam them into the bark, stretching her until she goes onto the tips of her toes.
“Stop!” she manages, breathless and frantic.
A breeze toys in the leaves above us, causing moonlit shadows to dance over her face. Her eyes illuminate—first one, then the other—but just long enough so I can see the stark fear painted over them before she’s cast in shadow again.
“You ruined my life,” I tell her in a furious whisper, my forehead touching hers as I try to see into her shadow-obscured eyes. “All I ever did was to try and help you, and this is how you repay me?”
She shivers under me, but stays quiet.
“Candy!”
Her body jerks like I’ve struck her. Something that could have been a sob escapes with her pathetic, “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not. If you were, then you’d have put up more of a fight. You’d have done whatever you could to set the record straight with Da—”